Navigating Kantian Thought with John Vervaeke

This dialogue with John Vervaeke about my new book Crossing the Threshold was recorded earlier this year. Claude’s summary:

The book discusses overcoming Kant’s epistemological barrier between the world and human reason. Kant erected this barrier to preserve human freedom and agency against the mechanistic worldview of science.

Matt aims to develop an “etheric imagination” as an organ of perception that allows us to cross Kant’s threshold and participate in the interiority of nature. He builds on Schelling, Whitehead, and Steiner’s ideas about an intuitive thinking that engages the living world beneath the sensory surface.

The book is an “experiment” in cultivating imagination and feeling to reconnect us to the world and cosmos. It moves beyond Cartesian rationality to a new logic of polarity that thinks difference without dualism.

Key concepts include the imaginal as augmenting perception, life as between matter and mind, and feeling as prehensive connection between self-organizing processes. These are mediating concepts that overcome Kant’s divides.

Broadening feeling in Whitehead’s sense allows us to understand how subjectivity goes “all the way down” to basic particles connecting through prehension. Imagination gives philosophers access to participatory knowing through being.

The book invites undertaking a philosophical experiment to develop imaginal perception. This could connect with John’s work on philosophical experimentation through dialogue. Further discussions could cover the convergence with neoplatonism.